LLM4Rec Papers

A curated, continuously updated collection of research on Large Language Models for Recommendation — spanning Generative Recommendation and Agentic Recommendation

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Most Recent Work in LLM4Rec

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Selected Papers in LLM4Rec

A curated collection of seminal papers that have shaped the two main tracks of LLM4Rec: Generative Recommendation and Agentic Recommendation.

🧬 Generative Recommendation

Reformulates recommendation as a sequence generation problem — encoding items as (semantic) IDs or tokens and training generative/transformer models to directly decode the next item(s) a user will interact with, replacing the traditional embed-and-retrieve pipeline.

Generative Rec · ✓ ACM RecSys 2022

Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)

Shijie Geng, Shuchang Liu, Zuohui Fu, Yingqiang Ge, Yongfeng Zhang

P5 is among the first works to unify diverse recommendation tasks (rating prediction, sequential recommendation, explanation generation, review summarization, direct recommendation) into a single text-to-text generative framework built on a pretrained language model, establishing the "Recommendation as Language Processing" paradigm.

@inproceedings{geng2022recommendation,
  title     = {Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified
               Pretrain, Personalized Prompt \& Predict Paradigm (P5)},
  author    = {Geng, Shijie and Liu, Shuchang and Fu, Zuohui and Ge, Yingqiang and
               Zhang, Yongfeng},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems},
  pages     = {299--315},
  year      = {2022}
}
Generative Rec · ✓ NeurIPS 2023

Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (TIGER)

Shashank Rajput, Nikhil Mehta, Anima Singh, Raghunandan Hulikal Keshavan, Trung Vu, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Jonah Samost, Maciej Kula, Ed H. Chi, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy

TIGER proposes generative retrieval for recommendation: items are mapped to semantically meaningful Semantic IDs via RQ-VAE, and a Transformer sequence-to-sequence model autoregressively decodes the Semantic ID of the next item, replacing nearest-neighbor search over a unified embedding space.

@inproceedings{rajput2023recommender,
  title     = {Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval},
  author    = {Rajput, Shashank and Mehta, Nikhil and Singh, Anima and
               Keshavan, Raghunandan Hulikal and Vu, Trung and Heldt, Lukasz and
               Hong, Lichan and Tay, Yi and Tran, Vinh Q and Samost, Jonah and
               Kula, Maciej and Chi, Ed H and Sathiamoorthy, Maheswaran},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  volume    = {36},
  year      = {2023}
}
Generative Rec · ✓ ICML 2024

Actions Speak Louder than Words: Trillion-Parameter Sequential Transducers for Generative Recommendations (HSTU)

Jiaqi Zhai, Lucy Liao, Xing Liu, Yueming Wang, Rui Li, Xuan Cao, Leon Gao, Zhaojie Gong, Fangda Gu, Michael He, Yinghai Lu, Yu Shi

This Meta paper reformulates industrial-scale recommendation as a sequential transduction task and proposes HSTU, a new generative-recommender architecture that scales to trillions of parameters, outperforms FlashAttention2-based Transformers, and empirically follows a power-law scaling trend with training compute.

@inproceedings{zhai2024actions,
  title     = {Actions Speak Louder than Words: Trillion-Parameter Sequential
               Transducers for Generative Recommendations},
  author    = {Zhai, Jiaqi and Liao, Lucy and Liu, Xing and Wang, Yueming and
               Li, Rui and Cao, Xuan and Gao, Leon and Gong, Zhaojie and Gu, Fangda
               and He, Michael and Lu, Yinghai and Shi, Yu},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2024}
}
Generative Rec · ✓ Industrial Deployment (Kuaishou)

OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignment

Jiaxin Deng, Shiyao Wang, Kuo Cai, Lejian Ren, Qigen Hu, Weifeng Ding, Qiang Luo, Guorui Zhou

OneRec replaces Kuaishou's cascaded retrieve-and-rank pipeline with a single end-to-end generative model: an encoder-decoder with sparse Mixture-of-Experts that performs session-wise generation, further improved with iterative preference alignment, and is deployed in production on a short-video platform with hundreds of millions of daily active users.

@article{deng2025onerec,
  title   = {OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender
             and Iterative Preference Alignment},
  author  = {Deng, Jiaxin and Wang, Shiyao and Cai, Kuo and Ren, Lejian and
             Hu, Qigen and Ding, Weifeng and Luo, Qiang and Zhou, Guorui},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18965},
  year    = {2025}
}

🤖 Agentic Recommendation

Treats recommendation as a reasoning and decision-making process carried out by LLM-powered agents — equipped with memory, tools, planning, and multi-agent collaboration — rather than a single-shot scoring/ranking function.

Agentic Rec · ✓ ACL 2026 · 🌟 Our Work

MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System

Weixin Chen, Yuhan Zhao, Jingyuan Huang, Zihe Ye, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Li Chen, Yongfeng Zhang

Agentic Memory LLM Collaborative Filtering

The evolution of recommender systems has shifted preference storage from rating matrices and dense embeddings to semantic memory in the agentic era...Read more

🎮 Try Live Demo 📄 ACL Paper
@inproceedings{chen2026memrec,
  title   = {MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System},
  author  = {Chen, Weixin and Zhao, Yuhan and Huang, Jingyuan and Ye, Zihe and
             Ju, Clark Mingxuan and Zhao, Tong and Shah, Neil and Chen, Li and
             Zhang, Yongfeng},
  year    = 2026,
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)},
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ ACL 2025 Findings

iAgent: LLM Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems

Wujiang Xu, Yunxiao Shi, Zujie Liang, Xuying Ning, Kai Mei, Kun Wang, Xi Zhu, Min Xu, Yongfeng Zhang

This work proposes iAgent, an LLM-based agent that acts as a protective shield between users and recommender systems, enabling more transparent and controllable recommendation processes.

@inproceedings{xu2025iagent,
  title     = {i{A}gent: {LLM} Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems},
  author    = {Xu, Wujiang and Shi, Yunxiao and Liang, Zujie and Ning, Xuying and
               Mei, Kai and Wang, Kun and Zhu, Xi and Xu, Min and Zhang, Yongfeng},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, {ACL} 2025},
  pages     = {18056--18084},
  year      = {2025}
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ ACM SIGIR 2024

MACRec: A Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Recommendation

Zhefan Wang, Yuanqing Yu, Wendi Zheng, Weizhi Ma, Min Zhang

MACRec introduces a multi-agent collaboration framework where multiple LLM agents work together to improve recommendation quality through collaborative reasoning and information sharing.

@inproceedings{wang2024macrec,
  title     = {Macrec: A Multi-agent Collaboration Framework for Recommendation},
  author    = {Wang, Zhefan and Yu, Yuanqing and Zheng, Wendi and Ma, Weizhi and
               Zhang, Min},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research
               and Development in Information Retrieval},
  pages     = {2760--2764},
  year      = {2024}
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ ACM SIGIR 2024

On Generative Agents in Recommendation

An Zhang, Yuxin Chen, Leheng Sheng, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

This paper explores the potential of generative agents powered by large language models in recommendation scenarios, discussing their capabilities, challenges, and future directions.

@inproceedings{zhang2024generative,
  title     = {On Generative Agents in Recommendation},
  author    = {Zhang, An and Chen, Yuxin and Sheng, Leheng and Wang, Xiang and
               Chua, Tat-Seng},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research
               and Development in Information Retrieval},
  pages     = {1807--1817},
  year      = {2024}
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ ACM TOIS 2025

User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model based Agents

Lei Wang, Jingsen Zhang, Hao Yang, Zhi-Yuan Chen, Jiakai Tang, Zeyu Zhang, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Hao Sun, Ruihua Song, et al.

This work presents a framework for simulating realistic user behaviors using LLM-based agents, enabling better testing and evaluation of recommender systems without real user data.

@article{wang2025user,
  title   = {User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model-based Agents},
  author  = {Wang, Lei and Zhang, Jingsen and Yang, Hao and Chen, Zhi-Yuan and
             Tang, Jiakai and Zhang, Zeyu and Chen, Xu and Lin, Yankai and Sun, Hao
             and Song, Ruihua and others},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Information Systems},
  volume  = {43},
  number  = {2},
  pages   = {1--37},
  year    = {2025}
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ IEEE Trans. 2024

RAH! RecSys-Assistant-Human: A Human-Centered Recommendation Framework with LLM Agents

Yubo Shu, Hansu Gu, Peng Zhang, Haonan Zhang, Tun Lu, Dongsheng Li, Ning Gu

RAH proposes a human-centric framework that leverages LLMs as assistants to facilitate better interaction between users and recommender systems, emphasizing user control and interpretability.

@article{shu2024rah,
  title   = {{RAH}! {R}ecSys-Assistant-Human: A Human-Centered Recommendation
             Framework with {LLM} Agents},
  author  = {Shu, Yubo and Gu, Hansu and Zhang, Peng and Zhang, Haonan and Lu, Tun
             and Li, Dongsheng and Gu, Ning},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems},
  volume  = {11},
  number  = {5},
  pages   = {6759--6770},
  year    = {2024}
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ NAACL 2024 Findings

RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent for Recommendation

Yancheng Wang, Ziyan Jiang, Zheng Chen, Fan Yang, Yingxue Zhou, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingzhen Yang

RecMind introduces a comprehensive agent framework powered by large language models that can understand user intent, reason about preferences, and generate personalized recommendations through multi-step reasoning.

@inproceedings{wang2024recmind,
  title     = {Recmind: Large Language Model Powered Agent for Recommendation},
  author    = {Wang, Yancheng and Jiang, Ziyan and Chen, Zheng and Yang, Fan and
               Zhou, Yingxue and Cho, Eunah and Fan, Xing and Lu, Yanbin and
               Huang, Xiaojiang and Yang, Yingzhen},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024},
  pages     = {4351--4364},
  year      = {2024}
}
Agentic Rec · ✓ ACM TOIS 2025

InteRecAgent: Recommender AI Agent - Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations

Xu Huang, Jianxun Lian, Yuxuan Lei, Jing Yao, Defu Lian, Xing Xie

InteRecAgent presents an AI agent that integrates large language models to enable interactive and conversational recommendations, supporting natural language queries and explanations for better user engagement.

@article{huang2025recommender,
  title   = {Recommender Ai Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive
             Recommendations},
  author  = {Huang, Xu and Lian, Jianxun and Lei, Yuxuan and Yao, Jing and
             Lian, Defu and Xie, Xing},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Information Systems},
  volume  = {43},
  number  = {4},
  pages   = {1--33},
  year    = {2025}
}

Datasets & Resources

Multimodal MovieLens 1M Dataset

GitHub Repo

Pre-extracted multimodal features for MovieLens 1M, enabling research on visual, textual, and acoustic perception in recommendation systems. Derived from movie trailers and metadata, processed with state-of-the-art encoders.

Modality Encoder Dimension Size
Visual ResNet50 (ImageNet pre-trained) 3,706 × 1,000 ~30 MB
Textual Sentence-Transformers 3,706 × 384 ~12 MB
Acoustic VGGish (YouTube-8M pre-trained) 3,706 × 128 ~4 MB
Interactions User-Item ratings with metadata 1,000,209 records ~39 MB

Download Components:

Note: All features are stored in NumPy .npy format (float32). The interaction file follows RecBole format with fields: userID, itemID, rating, timestamp, x_label (sensitive attribute), u_gender, u_age, u_occupation. Total dataset size: ~85 MB.

Citation:

@article{chen2025causality,
  title     = {Causality-Inspired Fair Representation Learning for Multimodal Recommendation},
  author    = {Chen, Weixin and Chen, Li and Ni, Yongxin and Zhao, Yuhan},
  journal   = {ACM Transactions on Information Systems},
  year      = {2025},
  volume    = {43},
  number    = {6},
  articleno = {153},
  numpages  = {29},
  doi       = {10.1145/3706602}
}